Meet Torstein Træen, The Stoic Norwegian Survivor Who Briefly Lit Up The Tour de France

PAU, France — Some people are natural performers. Torstein Træen is not, though his work on the bike might have been the last exciting general classification action before we get to Paris.

As the 30-year-old Norwegian rider ascended the podium in Foix after Stage 4 to be wrapped in the yellow jersey, he grinned sheepishly and his Uno-X teammates gathered below to cheer him on. You wouldn't know he was bringing such a strange, interesting cycling career to an ecstatic new high. Træen looked shy, rocking back and forth like a character in an RPG loading screen and forgetting to take the ceremonial stuffed lion of victory until the podium attendant nudged him on the arm.

At his official post-Tour press conference, at his other main interview, and at an interview after he crashed late in his first stage in the yellow jersey the next day (he's fine), the primary point Træen drove across was that he didn't really know what was going on. When a Japanese journalist looking for a very simple quote asked him about his extended family on the archipelago, Træen simply said, "I'm not really in contact with my Japanese family." Two days later, he was goofing around with the gendarmes and asking to hold one cop's gun. He is steady, laconic, the sort of rider I imagine Karl Ove Knausgaard would like (I emailed Knausgaard's representatives just in case). It didn't last, but it was beautiful.

So who is Torstein Træen? How did he get his hands on the biggest prize in cycling, and what happened to him?

Træen started riding for what's now Uno-X in 2015, when it was still Team Ringeriks-Kraft, one year before the giant Norwegian gas-station company got involved and sparked the team's ascent to the highest level of the sport. Træen has always been a good climber, and he began earning some solid results in the 2022 season, before a routine doping test in April briefly brought his career to a halt—not because it showed he'd been cheating, but rather because it flagged elevated hormone levels that enabled his doctors to identify and diagnose testicular cancer. After a brief absence, Træen got back to racing, and his big performance at the Dauphine earned him a spot on Uno-X's first-ever Grand Tour team at the 2023 Tour de France.

He crashed less than halfway through the first stage and broke his elbow. "I felt it quite fast that there was something that was not normal," he told Escape Collective's Iain Treloar. "Like, when you brake and you're hurting? Then it's quite special. And then if you shift gears—even though we are using electronic gears—it was still hurting. So I was thinking: This is not good."

Yes, correct, breaking one's elbow is classified, medically speaking, as "not good." Yet despite the pain and several subsequent crashes throughout that Tour, he finished in Paris 22 days later. That's the sort of rider Træen is, never too high, never too low. At the Vuelta last year, Træen took the red leader's jersey and held it for a few days. True to form, he expressed the blunt truth that he only had the jersey because Visma preferred for him, rather than Jonas Vingegaard, to have to deal with it.

As for this year's Tour, Træen was lurking a few minutes behind the big dogs after the first two stages in Barcelona. He knew he was well positioned to sneak into a breakaway and maybe again relieve Vingegaard of the burden of defending yellow on Stage 3, though Visma and later UAE brought back that move and set it up for Pogacar to fly to the victory. But the next day, partially due to the oppressive heat that gave Pogacar a severe headache, UAE was not going to spend the day fighting for a yellow jersey they didn't really want to have to defend this early in the race either. So Træen made his move, winding up in an elite, 35-man breakaway that featured several of the race's best sprinters, Lidl-Trek's full complement of destroyers (they played it perfectly for Mads Pedersen to win the stage), and, intriguingly, three EF riders.

As the break's advantage ballooned through the roasting day of racing, it seemed possible and then certain that someone new would take the yellow jersey. Would it be Træen or Sean Quinn, who trailed the Norwegian by 28 seconds? Whoever got it would turn out to have an eight-minute advantage over the main GC contenders, and could maybe keep it for a while. Opportunities like that don't come along in the Pogacar-Vingegaard era. The stakes were huge. EF tried to set up some attacks for Quinn, though Træen was unshakeable. As the remnants of the day's move followed Pedersen across the line in Foix, Træen's big moment was secure. His Uno-X team had their breakthrough win at last year's Tour, along with a strong sixth-place overall from Tobias Halland Johannessen. Getting into yellow is another step forward.

Outside the Uno-X bus on Wednesday, there were significantly more fans than usual. Uno-X is usually one of the most approachable teams here at the Tour, and while I got to chat with some staffers and get a sense of how they were feeling (Scandinavianly, they were pretty chill about the whole thing), journalists from Spain, the Netherlands, and of course Norway were there to check out the vibe. Said vibe was largely provided by a septet of Norwegian guys who were singing and performing the Viking row to toast Træen. His teammates clearly love him, and the extended bit they're going for is using the yellow jersey to solicit applications from fans to be Træen's girlfriend. It was, for a brief moment, all fun and games.

Alas, it was not to be. On the Tourmalet, Træen couldn't hold on as UAE started pounding the pace. He dropped with 10 kilometers left in the climb, though he had a teammate and he put his head down and cranked. If he could get over the top with a sub–five-minute gap, we reasoned in the press room, he might be able to put in a strong enough shift on the final climb to keep the jersey. But once UAE initiated its launch sequence, with Isaac Del Toro priming Tadej Pogacar to blast off, the dream began to die. Træen tried to fly with Pogacar; he'd turn out to be another bug caught in the zapper that is the greatest men's rider of all-time.

On the way down the Tourmalet, Træen's day took a much darker turn, as he overcooked a corner, ran into his own teammate's wheel, and slammed into the pavement at high speed. He smacked his head, and underwent a concussion check and got sprayed down with liters of pain spray. When he got back up and resumed riding, the crowd gathered at the finish roared in approval.

Træen wound up having a heroic day on the bike, not because he kept the yellow jersey, but because he survived to the finish. While Pogacar was finishing up his TV interviews, after most of the top 50 was descending back down Gavarnie-Gédre, there Træen was, rolling into the finish, smiling, with his teammate 29:57 after the winner.

His reign was brief, but now that Pogacar has retaken what was his earlier in the race, Træen's two-day run in yellow will stand as a fun little footnote no matter what happens over the next two weeks. At least we got to see him grace the world with a beautiful What are those? moment in Pau.